An Energy-Efficient Cell Outage Detection Algorithm for Self-Organizing Networks

Faults and failures are inevitable in dense hetero-geneous wireless networks consisting of a massive number of elements. Automatic management of faulty situations is critical in such complex networks. Among the common network failures, cell outage calls for an especial attention. Automatic and efficient management of cell outage improves users' quality of experience and leads to a significant reduction in operational expenditure (OPEX). Timely and rapid detection of cell outage is the first and somehow the most important step in the cell outage management. In this work, we propose a low complexity and energy efficient cell outage detection algorithm. The proposed algorithm utilizes minimization of drive test (MDT) mechanism to gather users' measurements. Applying outlier detection algorithm followed by a novel localization method, occurrence of cell outage and its location can be determined precisely. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method in both detection and localization of the cell outage.